On 12/22/05, Joseph Garvin <k04jg02 at kzoo.edu> wrote:
>> What usability? I've been reading the mailing list for a few months now,
> and the only extent of 'usability' discussions for wine has been over
> whether or not experienced linux geeks will be confused by options in
> winecfg. That's not usability. That just means it's easy for hardcore
> users to figure things out without having to look for docs. The work
> being done in winecfg is both good and necessary, but it's still a long
> ways away from wine being 'usable' to non-geeks.
Wine is an open source project, and as such, the developers of wine
encourage peer review. We value bug reports, comments, suggestions,
and criticisms, whether good or bad, so that we can make wine a better
application. Your comments infer that the developers aren't
interested in making wine easier for the end user, or that we are too
'hardcore' to realize that wine may be hard to use. The latter is
possible, but the former is completely untrue. We take usability
reports very seriously, and increasing usability is a top priority.
The only problem is that we don't get those types of reports as often
as we should. One reason why we don't get these reports is because
users have winetools to make wine easier. They don't run wine
directly, configure wine with winecfg, and stumble over any usability
issues. That is why this issue began in the first place.
Speaking specifically to you Joseph, I've checked through the
wine-devel and wine-users mailing list archives for reports of
usability issues from you, but this is the first one. The
constructive thing to do would be to politely report your problems on
the wine-devel list, or even file bug reports for them.
> When all of the binary packages (heck, any) on winehq.org have .Desktop files so that winecfg
> is at least accessible without the use of a terminal,
On at least KDE and Gnome, alt-f2 will bring up a run dialog, type
winecfg and press enter. Even if winecfg was only usable from the
command line, that doesn't count against usability. If that were the
case, many well-known command line applications would be considered to
have poor usability.
> and you can launch a wine application that asks the user what windows
> app they would like to run or make shortcut to so they don't have to use
> terminal there either, /then/ maybe there can be some usability discussion.
winefile
>> And then maybe it would be appropriate to remove winetools.
>
Please re-read the posts. No one is advocating removing winetools,
only the link to the winetool's download from winehq.org.
--
James Hawkins